Willimantic women to observe El Salvadoran election

Monday

Jan 20, 2014 at 10:17 PMJan 20, 2014 at 10:17 PM

By Francesca KefalasFor The Bulletin

Two Willimantic women are hoping to make a difference in the upcoming El Salvadoran elections.

Jean de Smet and Carol Silva have joined the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, which is sending 40 observers, including members of the National Lawyers Guild and the Carter Center, for the Feb. 2 election.

“They told us to bring lots of paper and pens so we can write everything down we see,” Silva said. “We’re to observe and report. That’s it.”

El Salvador currently has a democratically elected president. The last election was in 2009, when Mauricio Funes, member of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front party, was elected despite reports that the party in power at the time, the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance, or ARENA, brought in voters from neighboring countries.

Silva and de Smet said they have been told that even the United States is interfering with the upcoming election, publicly promising neutrality but threatening to withhold aid if the ARENA candidate is not elected.

Silva and de Smet are both very aware of how elections work in the United States. De Smet successfully ran as a third-party candidate for first selectman in Windham and served from 2007-09. She lost her bid in 2009 for mayor to another third-party candidate. Silva helped run those campaigns. Both are trained to be election audit observers, and de Smet has done the job numerous times.

“I see where mistakes are inadvertently made,” de Smet said. “I know that just because there are observers in the room, they will look up and realize they can’t take a shortcut. They have to follow the procedure exactly. I thought it would be very interesting to take my skills and experience and help to protect fair and honest elections of a fledgling government.”

But de Smet said she needed a bit of prodding to go on the trip. She mentioned it to Silva and was hesitating until Silva jumped at the opportunity. Silva has traveled with Witness for Peace, a nonprofit, politically independent organization that sends observers to Latin America and the Caribbean in the hopes of changing U.S. policies affecting those nations.

“In our foreign policy, we don’t have a history of doing the same things in foreign countries that we think we should be doing here,” de Smet said of the U.S.

Silva said she is hopeful that after five years of having a leader who was elected by the people, El Salvadorans will feel even more confident in their elections this time around.

“I think it’s very important, whoever it is that they elect, there is monitoring,” Silva said. “So that the people there know we’re there to keep elections clean, and that’s all.”